


Helen and Cassandra

by MontagueBitch (porcia_catonis)



Category: The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Femslash, M/M, Post-The Magicians, Pre-Magician King
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-09 17:01:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5548310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/porcia_catonis/pseuds/MontagueBitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Janet was fond of Julia, and Julia liked her privacy.  It wasn't a secret romance, so much as one that was no one's business but their own, locked away in a room in Whitespire, or, on one occasion, out in the Queenswood. [Main Ship: Janet/Julia, side pairing: Quentin/Eliot]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One Good Night

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, between Janet, Julia, and Alice, there's not a combination I don't ship. Anyway, this is mostly inspired by Janet and Eliot's conversation in The Magician's Land, where she mentions having been fond of Julia, but not demonstrative.

Janet wasn't sure when her habit of spending the winding hours of the night in Julia's room had begun, but she'd found herself still here, night after night, for some weeks now.  Maybe it had started when Eliot and Quentin started to click together, since Eliot had started whispering things to Quentin which made him laugh, and no one else in the room got to know about it.  Maybe it had started when Julia had wanted company, something she often floated by without a care for, but wanted little to do with either male monarch available.  

However it had all begun, Queen Janet of Fillory found herself sitting on Queen Julia's bed, and it felt as familiar and comfortable as her own.  Julia was sitting still, half-undressed, letting Janet run a brush through black hair that pilled down her back, and the tips rested lightly on the bed.  Janet fumbled awkwardly with the brush, trying so hard not to snag and pull her hair, and wincing every time she failed.  Not, of course, that it seemed to phase Julia, to whom pain came much harder than to everyone else, but even so, she had the sort of hair too pretty to pull for anything other than sex.  Added to it that Janet hadn't had close enough friends as a girl to have been allowed to brush someone's hair, she really didn't know what she was doing.

"Sorry," She found herself grinding out as she tried again to be gentle after giving Julia's head a visible enough jerk to move her slightly.

"I have had my hair pulled harder than this," said Julia.  Impassive as per usual, she only looked at Janet for a moment.  She swore she saw a quirk of humor, more in the lips than in the eyes, but even though Julia's eyes themselves were blank, there was the slightest scrunch by her laugh lines that made Janet wonder if that hadn't been some sort of jest.  "You do not have to continue, though, if you like."

Janet took a moment's pause.  She did not, in fact, want to leave, and end up in her own room, staring at the ceiling for hours alone, or wandering the courtyard for hours.  But why was she staying, if she put the brush down?  She couldn't think of a valid, less pathetic reason than 'I don't want to be alone.'  "That bad at it, am I?"  She scowled.  She hated not excelling at things, no matter their scale, and it was enough to sour her slightly.  "Unless getting your hair pulled is a turn-on, or something."

"Generally, I like you more than I have anyone else who has pulled my hair.  But I think you would do it well."  That made Janet's moment of indignation pass, and gave her a moment's smug delight.  Of course she'd pull her hair better, and of fucking course she was preferable.  It gave her the courage to keep her seat when she put the brush down.  She hadn't thought Julia had any great problem with her, but whether or not Julia actually, honestly  _liked_ her had been a different thing to map out entirely.  Janet wasn't so illusioned, like Eliot, to believe that Julia didn't feel like the rest of them; she had assumed, merely, that Julia had her way of acknowledging, expressing, and acting on it.  She was coded, and that code, though different, could probably be learned with time.

"Damn right, I would."  She scooted a little closer, and brushed the hanging hair away from Julia's face.  Julia was, Janet admitted without envy to herself, painfully gorgeous.  She was a mournful Medea, or a clawed Cassandra. If Janet knew how to paint, she'd have rendered her like that, somehow.  She had the kind of look to her that wasn't found outside of paintings.  But that wasn't the sort of thing Janet wanted to gush aloud, or that Julia would want to hear.

Already, Janet had realized a few rules of keeping Julia's company.  The first was not to expect things, one way or the other, of her.  She operated to her own standards, whether you wanted her to or not.  Admirable, really.  The second rule was that Julia could appreciate company, quips, and even closeness.  But she wasn't one for displays of it.  Were Janet to make a show of it, it would be a one woman show that Julia would rather not participate in among the company of others.  She could be kind, and show her own warmth, but on her terms, in her own space.  Janet almost preferred this to the kind of performance of other relations, where it was all about impression and theatrics.  She and Julia did what they did during the day, and alone, they could open up a bit.

Julia turned, and her eyes were on Janet's.  They were dark, and glossed over, and hard to interpret, but Janet had never found it something to be concerned by.  If anything, it meant that Julia would look out you without the lazer-point gaze that most held, and you felt acutely examined.  When Julia looked at her, she didn't feel the need to alter herself.  "You might try sometime."  

Janet had a moment's urge to quip back with _that's what your mom said,_ but she ignored the mental knee-jerk, and stuffed her inner twelve-year-old-boy into a locker where he belonged.  Julia wanted her to pull her hair, without the aid of a hairbrush, and Janet honestly didn't want to say no.  She'd never kissed a girl, not even at a party.  She'd never needed to try hard to be impressive or wanted, so she'd never had a proper exploration of another girl that so many deemed a rite of passage.  Thinking about it now, the whole idea didn't sound half bad.  After all, what girl didn't know where the clit was?  And girls were so much smarter than guys, about everything in the world that mattered.  She wouldn't mind pulling Julia's pretty waves for her _at all_ , on second thought. 

"Only if you want the night of your life," she kept herself nonchalant, collected.  She couldn't guess when the last time Julia had gotten any was, but she had the feeling it was a long time ago, at any rate. 

"I would not mind a night that was not terrible, for once."  Something pulled at Janet's icy little heart-strings there.  The poor thing had, undoubtedly, seen some shit.  Janet knew more about it than most, from nights spent alone, but only allusions with vague references that were not elaborated on.  She had felt could feel part of Julia wanting to explain, but a stronger part knowing she didn't have the means to, not yet. But she just wanted one good night, and Janet was all too capable of giving it to her.

"Well," she leaned forward, beckoning her silently, though Julia remained still.  "Come here, then."  She leaned her head upward, and her lips pressed against Julia's.  Against the moment's worry she'd had, they were not unyielding.  Julia welcomed her kiss, and returned it.  At first, it was curious, and slight.  Not soft, not tentative, but more like the prodding of a wound, or testing cold water.  It took only a moment more before she was hungry, ravenous against Janet's mouth, and her arms were circling Janet's neck, and a long-fingered hand was in her hair.

Janet didn't waste time keeping their clothes on, and Julia didn't either.  For a split second she felt so annoyingly small next to the hourglass girl beside her, but by the time they were both naked, Janet realized how little that mattered.  It was only guys who noticed that kind of thing, and what the hell did they have to do with this anyhow? 

After what had to be more than an hour, and three leg-shaking, shoulder-biting moments of climax, each, they were thoroughly spent, laying tangled below Julia's covers to keep wrapped up in each other and safe from the draft.  Rather, to keep Janet safe from the draft.  She'd started to shiver and Julia had scooped her up and tucked them both under the blankets, and it was so fucking nice that Janet hoped it would never end.

"I don't wanna leave,"  Janet said, with her face buried in Julia's neck.

"I would rather you did not," Julia kissed her brow and tightened her arms, currently wrapped around Janet's waist.

And so she didn't leave, and so Julia spent her good night curled up with Janet, beneath the cover of her blankets.


	2. Strawberry Girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julia and Janet begin to make a habit of late-night visits. King Quentin continues to stun the land with his powers of obliviousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the comments, those who made them! I think I know where I'm going with this fic, and it'll have its own little arc. So there'll be four installments total, by the time I'm finished. I'm just glad to know there are other people who like magic lady-loving ladies!

It had felt like just seconds after Julia had left the dinner table there came a creak, and the opening of a door behind her.  She had came into her room, and unplaited her hair, and whatever had come next was rode a slope too glossy for anything to stick to.  Julia would have sworn she had just as soon sat down as heard the door, but for the sky’s having been pink when she came in, and grey-blue now.  She was used to lost time; hours had been voiding themselves like bad checks for years.  There used to be whole days where Julia may as well have been frozen in quasicrystal, when nothing could stick to her, nothing felt important, and ‘memorable’ was a theory she hadn’t been able to grasp.  But she hadn’t lost time in weeks, and Julia still couldn’t quite lie down when her mind betrayed her.  She still wanted to beat it down, mold it to its proper brilliance, and take it back again.  She’d spent so long killing time, that time often died around her now, even when she wanted the life breathed into it.

Janet was excellent at keeping time alive.  Whatever interval had preceded her coming, Janet was a welcome change.  She’d been coming in reliably, over the past few weeks.  First, it would be every other night.  Then there had come a string of nights where she hadn’t been without her company.  That sequence culminated in one particular night three weeks prior, where Janet hadn’t left until morning, and now rarely skipped her visit to Julia’s bedroom.  Julia turned to look at her on entry.  She trusted bright-eyed, hard-hearted Janet to know that her movements were few, and one towards her meant something.

“You dodged a bullet out there.”  Janet spread herself along Julia’s bed.  She lay down slowly, and stretched herself; she lay like a lion, claiming anything she came on like her own.  Julia had always been amused, the way ownership turned to fluid sometimes, and all rivers seemed to flow to Janet.  “One of the more dull evenings you can imagine.”  She scoffed, and the smile that remained was all teeth.  Delicate and draped in fine cloth, with bared teeth and the stance of a hunter, Janet was a Helen of Troy who became her own Menelaus.  Julia imagined a kidnapped queen who took up her husband’s war-axe and carved her way through the walls back home.  She was the sort of lover men could dread being tied to by Aphrodite. And yet she could yawn and roll onto her back, letting her head rest on Julia’s lap with her hair spilling everywhere just a moment later.

“You do not,”  Julia endeavored to stroke the hair that pooled, wildly and without care, against her leg, “have to stay, if you gain no enjoyment of it.”  She knew Janet would never leave until the last cork of a party had been cast off.  But there was some amusement to be had in hearing the woes of someone who wouldn’t have it any other way.  Janet understood people.  She thrived around them in ways that never appealed to Julia, but often looked like their own form of magic to watch.  Janet could render tears as easily as peals of laughter, and she seemed to be an impeccable judge of which to elicit, generally.

Janet pouted, all lip and eyes cast up in Julia’s direction.  “And miss everything?  And miss the wine?”  She wrinkled her nose, shook her head.  “I don’t think so.  I get my time alone after that.”

“You seem not to need me to open my door to you.  You have a sanctuary, if needed.”  Janet rolled her eyes.  She seemed to watch onto the quirks of humor Julia had not lost, but buried, in ways that deadened on others.  It was one of many reasons Janet was fast becoming her favorite companion.  

Janet leaned up, pulling herself forward and turning around, so that she could kiss her.  “I think I can handle myself,” she kissed her again.  There was a conflict, clear in her eyes, between kissing and speech, that couldn’t coincide. “But I might fuck off just for this, if that’s what you’re offering."

There had been too many times, already, where they had done just that.  Julia would pause, sometimes, and catch her eye across a room, and drift off toward her own.  In just a few minutes, Janet would depart, her flippant adieu to Eliot and Quentin--generally, this was abandoned in favor of a ‘bye, bitches,’ if no one else was about--wafting down the hall after her.  And there she would be, in Julia’s room, painfully lovely, and wild in a way that no one else Julia had known could quite master.  Janet was her own being entirely, and Julia loved it in her.  She loved that Janet was prickly, and pragmatic, and dramatic and without apology.  She did not flinch from any sharpness in Janet, and Janet did the same to her.  

Julia returned the soft kisses, and braced her hand against the neck.  They still bit each other, as they had that first night--there were always times where Julia wanted to eat Janet whole, and devour whatever made her so vibrant, and so sweet under her hands and her lips.  But some new form of touching had arose lately, between them, where claws would stay sheathed during caresses.  Kisses stopped being greedy and gained the air of a gift, passed back and forth between to two of them.  Janet’s arms wrapped around her, and pulled her down to the bed with her once the kiss broke.

The bed had taken the scent of Janet's perfume into itself, the same scent she wore now.  Julia had always been fond of it.  Something about it, warm and strong with an edge of spice to it, had seemed so perfectly suited to the wearer.  It mixed with the type of wine the castle had been serving the past few nights.  It was an oddly pleasant one, as she had noticed.  Strawberries and burnt sugar; and it tasted even better as a ghost on Janet's lips.  She felt like Romeo, now, kissing her again and again, to take some of the sweetness from Janet's lips, which she gave generously back.  Julia always remembered how thirsty she was, how insatiable, after one taste of her strawberry girl.  She took all she could from her mouth, and her neck, and all her clothes would allow of her collarbone, before they finally just did away with their clothes.  Then she kissed her way down from Janet's kiss-swollen lips, to her neck, down her belly and lower, until there was a hand taking her hair by the fistful, and Janet the Lionhearted was mewling like a kitten.

"Fuck," she felt her head jerked upwards, as shaking thighs tried so hard to clamp shut around her.  She wasn't done, quite yet.  She drew it out for just a few more desperate moans, profanities and prayers were spilled across the bed to relent.  She'd grown so fond of her taste, that it was almost sad, each time, to pull away.

"God, I hate you,"  She could have sworn Janet was whimpering as she was licking her lips.

Julia leaned down to kiss her again, as she did every time she ate her.  Something was oddly calming in making her warrior queen go mad, and she always felt less hungry in her soul afterwards.  "Is that so?"  

Janet, beneath her, still flushed and soft, was already grinning.  "Fuck you."  Janet's kiss back to her was like the angry, burning ones they'd started with, and she pulled away with a smack.  "On your back."  She ordered.  Julia had never taken pleasure like Janet could give her before, and she could have it a thousand times and not grow bored of it.  For a creature of ennui, that was all but divine.  Perhaps it was that Janet was the best she'd ever had, or perhaps it was that she'd never quite sought out what she needed before now.

For a while afterward, they clung together.  Janet lay against her chest, and Julia's arms kept her nestled there.  She had thought about lying with a girl on her chest, her heart beating like this, so many times in shitty safe house beds. She'd never gotten around to it, never found the right girl, but she would wish for a girl to know just how to touch her and who'd let her swallow her whole.  Or sometimes, she had just thought of how nice it would be, to be wrapped up together, safely ignoring everything else in the world for a few comfortable hours.  Any time she'd known love in the kindest sense, from her mother or from OLU, it had been from a woman.  Any time she'd known strength in the most effective of ways, it was when a girl pulled out her claws and bore her teeth and cut through anyone who stood in her way and hurt her.  When she took both of these things and put them together, they started to look a lot like Janet.  She almost felt normal, wrapped up safe and warm with another viper.

"I don't want to leave."  Janet said the same thing, sleepily, every night.

"I was not going to ask you to."  She was almost normal.  Words still fell strangely, and still formed as an afterthought, even now.  She couldn't, even if this was something that might become love, undo the parts of her that had changed.  "I will not ask you to, tomorrow, either."

Janet nuzzled her, and said nothing for a while, with the occasional movement to show she was still awake.  "Maybe tomorrow I'll stop asking to stay, then."

Janet wasn't awake much longer.  She'd always slept soundly, and her shallow breaths didn't change until the morning.

* * *

When Janet awoke, she'd kissed Julia sleepily good morning, and shoved her mussed hair from her eyes.  She'd clung to Julia for a while, not wanting to leave the bed and stubbornly clinging to sleep before her own hunger drew her out of bed, so she told Julia.  They dressed together, with the occasional quip or kiss to the forehead.  Good nights had become common, and since then she'd been forging a regular acquaintance with good mornings.  They were soft, and started with a kiss, and the sun felt warmer than it usually did.

As they left for breakfast together, Janet slightly ahead of Julia, nearly pulling her by the hand from the room, which she dropped past the door, Janet was collided with, nearly instantly, sending both parties lurching like brush in strong wind, until Quentin was caught by a wall, and Janet by herself.

"Nice walking, Your _Grace_ ," Quentin scowled, or he tried to, around the slight amusement he so obviously had.

"Original.  Wait, what're you doing coming out of Julia's bedroom so early, anyway?"  Julia wondered if Quentin thought to lack of Janet might have saved him from his own incomprehension.  It was a very Quentin thought process, after all; _if only Janet hadn't abnormally come out of that room.  Then nothing would have tripped me._ She could sort of hear it in his voice within her head.

Janet just shrugged.  "I can visit Julia when I want to."  She cast a wink in Julia's direction, something Julia was neither here nor there on.  "We're rather _close_ , actually."

Quentin's head tipped sideways.  "You are?"  Whatever joking insinuation Janet had been egging him towards was lost.  They'd been private enough, and he was dense enough, that it just wasn't going through until the day someone spelled it out for him.  "I didn't think you--"

"Just keep walking, Quentin, yeah?  You're taking up hallway space,"  Janet had lost her amusement, and with it her patience.  When they both started walking again, Julia followed, still feeling the sun on her back, even in the windowless corridor.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the distance in chapters, guys. I had stuff going on, and it got hard to find inspiration. Then I saw Carol and listened to a bunch of Marina and The Diamonds.

**Author's Note:**

> Yo, would you call this ship Juliet or Wichinsky? Comment below!


End file.
